Please Don’t Tell Me…

You have probably never heard of the musical A Slice Of Saturday Night – It’s not even running any more as far as I’m aware (more’s the pity, I’d love to actually see it). But the soundtrack, introduced to me by my eccentric GCSE Drama & Theatre Studies teacher, has constantly played in the background of my life ever since.

I will forget about it for a while, for months at a time, and then a song will pop into mind when someone says something or just at random and I will dig out my battered CD or my MP3 player and listen to it repeatedly, singing along like my life depends on it. And sometimes a song will make random thoughts pop into my head and I find myself planning a blog post in my head whilst watching the English countryside whizz past me on a train trip to London.

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Remember back when you were fifteen and someone told you that you couldn’t possibly be in love with your boy/girlfriend? Whoever that was, quite frankly, was an idiot.

You probably were in love with them. I know I was. Okay so maybe it wasn’t let’s get married and spend the rest of our lives together love, but it was still love.

Fifteen year olds are perfectly capable of love. Five year olds are capable of love. Babies are capable of love. And telling them otherwise is foolish.

There are many different types of love and I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about half of them but I do think it is something that should be accepted and encouraged, not scoffed at and pushed aside.

As an adult it is easy to look down on children and teenagers – I find myself doing it and it’s practically only five minutes since I was a teenager. It is easy to brush off their feelings as silly and unimportant. It is far too easy to forget that, at that moment in their life, what seems irrelevant to us means the world to them. They need to experience the heartbreak of unrequited love at school, they need to have the ups and downs of the love between friends and the twist of excitement when the person they fancy flashes them a grin and asks them to dance at the school disco. It will all pale to insignificance in a few years time when they get kicked out into the world outside of school/college/uni but those basic building blocks help prepare them for the rest of life.

Let’s face it, the ‘grown-up’ world is just one giant playground – It has the same fights, games and heartbreaks as school just on a bigger scale. Without the learning curve of teenage love and whatnot we wouldn’t stand a chance.

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What musical gem inspired this waffly train of thought on my way to London? (*cringe* pun not intended….) This: